"The same phenomenon was found in Canada, where the three most prominent business families were all Jewish—the Belzbergs of Vancouver, the Bronfmans of Montreal and the Reichmanns of Toronto."

--Edward S. Shapiro, 1992, "A Time For Healing: American Jewry After World War Two", p. 117

The Bronfmans' Leveraged Leviathan

By CLYDE H. FARNSWORTH For The New York TimesPublished: May 24, 1992Back
in 1979 two of Canada's great dynastic business families seemed headed
for a sensational confrontation. The Bronfman brothers, Edward and Peter
-- they're the "other" Bronfmans, not the Seagram branch of the family
-- and the Reichmann brothers, Paul, Albert and Ralph, coveted a real
estate holding company called Trizec Corporation. Trizec was the company
through which William Zeckendorf, the New York developer, assembled an
impressive collection of Canadian properties.The Bronfmans,
intent on building a real estate empire, had taken a 37 percent stake in
Trizec three years earlier. Then the Reichmanns, busy building their
own empire, came along and snapped up a 35 percent stake. The looming
collision over who would control Trizec promised to be as exciting as
any plot a potboiler novelist might dream up.But one day some
of the Bronfmans' lieutenants bumped into Paul Reichmann in a hotel
lobby. After a 10-minute chat, they discovered that the Reichmanns
really only wanted Trizec as an investment. They were perfectly willing
to let the Bronfmans continue running it. Corporate
Canada is, if anything, a vast web of interlocking companies owned by a
handful of wealthy families -- the Bronfmans, Reichmanns and Belzbergs,
for example. Typically, one family group takes stakes in the operations
of another and puzzling out who owns what, and where profits and losses
do or don't flow from, is akin to peeling away the layers of the
proverbial onion.So it was no surprise that the hotel-lobby
conversation 13 years ago led to a partnership deal between the
Bronfmans and the Reichmanns, a deal that still stands today. And it
also is no surprise that the Edper Group, as the Bronfmans' holdings are called,
is now under intense scrutiny because of the bankruptcy filing here 10
days ago by the Reichmanns' Olympia & York Developments Ltd.The
question now asked by investment bankers, stock analysts and executives
across Canada is this: Are the Bronfmans next? The answer is as elusive
as details of the workings of Edper and the Bronfmans, who, like the
Reichmanns, are legendary for their secrecy. Edper's Long Reach Edper
is about five times larger than Olympia & York and reaches even
more deeply into Canada's economic life. There are linkages through not
only their joint ownership of some assets, like Trizec, but also the
tens of millions of dollars of loans made by Edper companies to Olympia
& York. And the two groups do business in some of the same
sectors, particularly real estate, which has been rattled deeply by the
Reichmanns' troubles.Edper is a sprawling conglomerate of 500
private companies and 40 public companies with 100,000 employees and
assets of $100 billion (Canadian). By some estimates the publicly traded
companies account for more than 10 percent of the the Toronto Stock
Exchange's capitalization.Some of the jewels in the Edper crown:
Canada's largest concerns in forest products (MacMillan Bloedel), mining
(Noranda) and insurance (London Insurance); Canada's second-largest
trust company (Royal Trust) and brewer (John Labatt), and such huge real
estate operating companies as Trizec, which alone has assets of nearly
$12 billion and owns 72 percent of Bramalea Ltd., itself a troubled real
estate company with extensive United States holdings."I do
think we'll come out whole," said Willard J. L'Heureux, 44, a lawyer and
key strategist for the group. He runs Hees International Bancorp Inc.,
Edper's merchant bank. (The Bronfman brothers declined to be interviewed for this article.)

Today,
Jews can be numbered among the wealthiest Canadians. They have begun
slowly to penetrate those economic sectors that have hitherto been
closed to them, at the same time as they are building up wealth in
family-owned firms. In these days of global economic networks, the old Anglo-Canadian establishment may no longer be crucial to economic power. Families such as the Bronfmans, the Belzbergs, and the Reichmanns
represent just the tip of an extremely affluent segment of Jewish
society in Canada. Even as these wealthy Jews and their money begin to
be accepted in Gentile high society, they often retain strong loyalties to and status within the Jewish community. Their commitments, typified by gala fund-raising dinners, are routinely chronicled in Jewish-Canadian publications.

(...)“If an investigation of Jewish organizational life takes
place, I promise you that the last person standing will be Israel
Singer,” he says, referring to the Brooklyn rabbi who is at the center
of the controversy.

Since 1979, Singer and billionaire Edgar Bronfman have
skillfully and productively run the powerful World Jewish Congress. But
for the past eighteen months, the WJC has been embroiled in a vicious
internal battle, fueled by money, politics, and vast egos. The fight has
been so acrimonious and mean-spirited that it threatens the very
existence of the 68-year-old institution.

Accusations of mismanagement, bizarre bank transactions,
stolen e-mails and computer files, intimidation, and cover-ups, which
stretch from New York to Geneva to Jerusalem, have reached a decibel
level that has attracted the attention of the New York State attorney
general’s office, which is in the midst of a preliminary investigation.
Though the attacks focus mostly on Singer, Herbits, a longtime employee
of Bronfman’s who was brought onboard six months ago to manage the
crisis, seems to take it very personally. “There are no
illegalities in Israel Singer’s behavior, and that is not true of some
of the leaders
of these other organizations,” he says, standing now.

“I know it and they know it and they better be careful,
because if they cause enough problems in the press, then this
organization won’t be the only one that has a preliminary inquiry from
the attorney general’s office. Then you’ll see some real fireworks.”

Though the accusations he makes about other Jewish
organizations are serious and sweeping—false IRS filings, misuse of
funds, “outlandish” benefits packages, and lying to the
government—Herbits refuses to name names. “You’re not going to get me to
do that,” he snaps. “I’m not going to play that game.”

But given the chance, he doesn’t back down. Instead he
ratchets up the rhetoric a notch.
“I’m not going to sit by and let this organization take the rap for
their behavior,” he says. “If we get into that kind of pissing match,
this organization ain’t going down by itself.”

The man who built the
organization, Edgar Bronfman, the street-smart, sometimes coarse,
bullying businessman who took over the Seagram liquor dynasty started by
his father, Sam, is commonly regarded as the king of Jewish
philanthropy. In fact, there are some people who would simply call him
king of the Jews.

Since he rescued the World Jewish Congress from the edge of
extinction more than two decades ago, Bronfman, 75, has been its president, chief benefactor, and guiding force.(...)

The
envelope of the World Jewish Congress fundraising letter was marked
“Confidential” and began, “Saddam Hussein, Muammar Qadhafi and Hizbollah
radicals hope that you will put this letter aside. You see, these
terrorist thugs, and the countries that sponsor them, don’t want to hear
what the World Jewish Congress is doing to stop them….” After three
pages of the well-worn spiel frightening Jews into lightening their
fiscal load, we come upon the gratuitous stab at free Blacks:

Meanwhile
in America, more and more people are on TV calling the Holocaust [sic] a
“hoax”…and making wild accusations against “Zionist bankers” and
“bloodsucking Jews”-as we saw with the televised interviews with Louis
Farrakhan several months ago. And for every Farrakhan, we know of
hundreds of lesserknown, BUT EQUALLY DANGEROUS, anti-Semitic leaders.Edgar M. Bronfman, president World Jewish Congress

What could Bronfman
mean by “dangerous”? And isn’t Edgar Bronfman descended from the same
bootlegging Bronfmans who flooded America with bad whiskey during
Prohibition and who later bought Seagrams and proceeded to flood the
world with their distilled poison ever since? Stephen Birmingham, author
of The Rest of Us: The Rise of American Eastern European Jews, wrote of
those early Bronfman contributions to the American standard of living:

While
real Scotch whiskey might be aged for two to twelve years, Bronfman
Scotch could be aged in about two days….What no one noticed, either-not
even Sam Bronfman himself-was that with this haphazard mixing of
alcohol, real whiskey, and other ingredients, Bronfman was in the
process of inventing a whole new category of alcoholic beverage: blended
whiskey.

So, as the
Honorable Louis Farrakhan suffered, sacrificed, and dedicated his life
to the infusion of life into a destroyed people, the Bronfman legacy,
thus far, is the manufacture of alcoholic products that ensure Black
people’s destruction. Jewish Mafioso Meyer Lansky’s chief confederate,
Lucky Luciano, put it like this:

Sam
Bronfman was bootleggin’ enough whiskey across the Canadian border to
double the size of Lake Erie. It was no wonder that wags in the liquor
trade were beginning to refer to Lake Erie as “the Jewish lake.”

Headquartered in
Montreal, the Seagram Company Ltd. employs 30,000 people worldwide.
Seagrams liquors are sold in more than 197 countries and territories.
Affiliates and joint ventures in 41 countries comprise the largest
distribution system in the spirits and wine industry. Bronfman’s
Seagrams produces, markets, and distributes more than 226 brands of
distilled spirits, more than 180 brands of wines, champagnes, ports and
sherries, and more than 48 brands of coolers, beers, mixers and other
low-alcohol adult beverages. Some of the best-known brand names include
Crown Royal, Captain Morgan, Chivas Regal, and Absolut Vodka. The
Seagram entertainment/communications company MCA Inc. makes motion
pictures, television and home video products, publishes books, produces
recorded music, and operates theme parks, with significant holdings in
Time-Warner and Dupont. Among the many popular entertainment vehicles
they control are: Sheryl Crow, Bee Gees, Dru Hill, Enrique Iglesias,
Elton John, Jay-Z, Kirk Franklin, Woody Woodpecker, Motown Live, Blind
Date, The Flintstones, E.T.-The Extra Terrestrial, Jurassic Park, Xena:
Warrior Princess, and Bruce Lee.

Incredibly, these
same Bronfmans, who gross $6 billion annually, are now begging the world
for money to fight our leader and teacher, Min. Louis Farrakhan, under
the auspices of the World Jewish Congress.

But is Edgar
Bronfman really as concerned about terrorism as he claims? When the
figures compiled by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and
Alcoholism (NIAAA) are analyzed, perhaps Americans (and particularly
Blacks) would be much more concerned about Bronfman. According to the
NIAAA, the estimated cost of alcohol abuse was $185 billion for 1998;
drug abuse amounted to $98 billion. The estimated costs of alcohol abuse
are attributed to lost productivity, including losses from
alcohol-related illness, premature deaths, and crime, and the
expenditures on medical treatment. The costs of alcohol-related problems
such as human suffering and broken families are incalculable. As the
largest purveyor of alcohol in the world, what part of this human
tragedy can we attribute to the Bronfman liquor dynasty?

According to
Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), in the United States 75% of
unintentional injuries and 50% of the 12 leading causes of death are
directly or indirectly related to alcohol, nicotine, and other drugs.
The only age group in the United States whose life span is decreasing is
young people between the ages of 15 and 24, much of this decrease
attributed to alcohol consumption. The American Journal of Public Health
reports that the density of liquor stores is directly responsible for
increased aggression and crime. Among the Native Americans the scourge
is devastating. Mortality rates for crashes and alcoholism are 5.5 and
3.8 times higher, respectively, among the Native Americans than among
the general population. Among Southwestern Plains Indians, 10.7 of every
1,000 children were born with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome–born grasping for a Seagrams bottle!

When faced with
these gruesome realities about the poison that has made them rich, what
do the Bronfmans do? They have broken a decades-long ban against TV
advertisements for hard liquor and will now entice TV viewers to
surrender their livers to the Bronfman American vision-staggering and
blurred though it may be.

When the Bronfmans
and their World Jewish Congress refer to our leader, the Honorable Louis
Farrakhan as “dangerous,” we must consider the source. They know better
than anyone, that if Blacks of the world heeded the call of the Nation
of Islam to reject alcohol and drugs and come back to the only true
comforter–the God of the Universe–Bronfman and his cohorts would lose
EVERYTHING! Edgar Bronfman’s cheap ploy of crying “anti-Semitism!” and
“terrorism!” is merely a ruse to keep blended whiskey pouring into the
Black community and hard-earned cash flowing out. It is not hard to see
why the world’s foremost saloon keeper would be naturally hateful of the
evangelical teetotalism of the Nation of Islam.

Finally, as the
broken bodies, disintegrated families, disease and affliction are
tallied in America and the world, Blacks have but one question to ask
the undertaker: “Have we reached six million yet?”

The
Bronfmans held an interest in the Ernest W. Hahn Co. (which operated 27
shopping centers in California and had plans for another 29) and the
Trizec Corp., one of North America’s biggest property development
companies.

They controlled the
Shannon Mall in Atlanta and the Galleria in Westchester, N.Y. and a
shopping center in Hickory, N.C. Bronfman controlled industrial parks in
and near Los Angeles, office towers in Denver and San Francisco, and
housing developments in Nevada, California and Florida, as well as
Houston-based General Homes Consolidated, building houses in Mississippi
and Alabama.

And they owned vast tracts of land in Virginia outside Washington, D.C.

And
although the famous “Du Pont” name appeared on company products, the
real power behind the scenes was Bronfman who—not content with owning
20% of the distinguished institution—took complete control in 1981,
ultimately divesting his holdings.

Death of the Liquor King:The life, times and misdeedsof Edgar Bronfman Sr.
See pages 12-13A devout Talmudic Jew, Edgar Bronfman bankrolledmany Zionist causes over the years with the billions ofdollars he made hawking Canadian booze.

THE KING OF THE JEWS IS DEAD• Edgar Bronfman—one of the world’s most powerful Zionists—finally dies
By Michael Collins Piper
The
patriarch of a crime syndicate-connected empire that has operated in
the sphere of the Rothschild dynasty is dead. On Dec. 22, Edgar M.
Bronfman—longtime head of the World Jewish Congress—died at age 84. New
York magazine once described him as a “sometimes coarse, bullying
businessman” but noted “there are some people who would simply call him
king of the Jews.”
Rabbi Mishael Zion has hailed Bronfman as “a
modern Talmudic Jew,” noting Bronfman’s favorite book was the Babylonian
Talmud, the hero of which, the rabbi admitted, is not God but the
“cunning human scholar.” Praising Bronfman’s work funding scholarships
for Jewish youth, the rabbi said Bronfman was “the person who invited us
to live Talmudically in the modern world.”
This recalls Meyer
Rothschild, founder of the dynasty with whom Bronfman’s family has had a
long association. An admiring biographer once said Rothschild was “a
zealous believer in the Talmud and chose it alone as the guiding
principle of all his actions.”
It is thus fitting that Bronfman
biographer Peter C. Newman said the Bronfmans were “the Rothschilds of the
New World,” estimating in 1978 that Bronfman assets totaled some $7
billion. In fact, Edgar Bronfman had a level of clout few could claim,
precisely because of his front-line positioning in the Zionist movement
and his family’s pivotal historic role in the crime syndicate.
Edgar
was son of Sam Bronfman who immigrated to Canada from Russia and made
his fortune in liquor, gambling, prostitution and drugs. Going
“legitimate” when he assumed control of the Montreal-based Seagram
distillery, Sam forged links with the New York crime syndicate headed by
another Russian Jew, Meyer Lansky, and during Prohibition supplied—and
thus controlled—the “spigot” of liquor funneled into the U.S. and
distributed by the Lansky mob.
In many border towns in the northern
U.S there are family fortunes accumulated by locals who were part of the
Bronfman network. And in the big cities, a connection with this
syndicate was a “must.” In Detroit, the “little Jewish navy” of Morris
Dalitz—later Lansky’s top man in Las Vegas—ferried Bronfman booze into
the U.S.
Even Chicago’s celebrated Italian-American gangster, Al
Capone, owed his rise to his own Bronfman connection. It was Lansky who
sent Capone to Chicago from New York in the first place, assigned to
work for Johnny Torrio (Bronfman’s Chicago contact) who was moving to
unseat “Big Jim” Colosimo as Italian-American Mafia chief in the Windy
City.
Colosimo had alienated Lansky and Bronfman—whom he called
“dirty Jews”—by asserting there was “no future in bootlegging,” showing
little interest in patronizing Bronfman liquor, preferring to focus on
drugs, prostitution and loan-sharking.
So a Jewish hitman from New
York “retired” Big Jim and soon enough, Bronfman liquor flowed into
Chicago. The media lionized Capone, but the Chicago mob, thenceforward,
was dominated by behind-the-scenes Jewish bosses.
In any case,
Bronfman plowed his ill-gotten gains into legitimate enterprises,
establishing his family as major patrons of Israel and expanding their
power on American shores.
When Sam died, Edgar assumed family
leadership and—though little known to the public—was one of the most
powerful figures on the planet.
Today, his legacy lives on.
Aside
from wheeler-dealer son, Edgar Jr., son Matthew chairs the board of the
World Jewish Congress and is a controlling shareholder of one of
Israel’s largest banks, Israel Discount Bank, and other Israeli
enterprises. Son Adam directs a family foundation and lives off family
wealth. Daughter Holly—interestingly—shares the same high-powered Texas lawyer as media icon Alex Jones.
Bronfman bankrolled Mort Zuckerman,
now a billionaire, who in turn bankrolled Dan Snyder, now billionaire
owner of the Washington Redskins football team. They, too, are Bronfman
heirs in their own respect.

(...)The Montreal-born Bronfman was chief executive until
retiring in 1994 of the Seagrams Company, the liquor distilling empire
built by his late father Samuel Bronfman. He served for 28 years, 1979
to 2007, as president of the World Jewish Congress.

Edgar and his brother Charles gradually emerged after
their father’s death in 1971 as among the most prodigious and creative
philanthropists in the world Jewish community. Neither had previously
been known as major participants in Jewish life, and their evolution in
adulthood as Jewish communal leaders defied expectations of many
Canadian Jewish observers, who had long predicted that the Bronfman
fortune would be lost to Jewish causes after the death of “Mr. Sam.”

Edgar’s Jewish involvements included the creation of
the Bronfman Youth Fellowships in Israel, an intense, all-expenses-paid
summer leadership program for 11th graders and leading a transformation
and modernization of Hillel. Those who knew him well often pointed to
his hosting of a weekly Shabbat morning service in his home. It became
one of the most exclusive and sought-after Jewish prayer venues in New
York.

He was best known for his leadership of the World
Jewish Congress, where he worked for decades in close partnership with
WJC’s top staffer and chief strategist, Israel Singer. Their most famous
campaign was the long, bitter struggle against the Swiss banking
industry to win restitution of funds that belonged to Holocaust
survivors and victims’ heirs but were never returned after the war.

Wikimedia Commons

Edgar and Sam Bronfman (undated photo)

Others included the battle against the Carmelite
convent at Auschwitz, the campaign to expose the Nazi past of Austrian
president and former U.N. secretary general Kurt Waldheim and the
international campaign to pressure the Vatican to open its World War
II-era archives and admit to moral failings during the Holocaust.

(...)
In 1996, in a much-noted speech to the General Assembly
of the Council of Jewish Federations (today’s Jewish Federations of
North America) Edgar criticized the massive expenditure of Jewish
philanthropic dollars on defending Jews and Israel and failure to tackle
what he said was the greatest threat to the Jewish future,
assimilation.
That declaration reflected his growing commitment to
Jewish educational projects such as the youth fellowships and Hillel.
Nonetheless, he reportedly made a gift to AIPAC the following year in
excess of $120,000. (...)

Edgar Bronfman Philantropist and Jewish communal leader, dies at 84 | JTA
NEW YORK (JTA) — Edgar Bronfman, the billionaire former beverage
magnate and leading Jewish philanthropist, died Saturday at the age of
84.
As the longtime president of the World Jewish Congress, Bronfman
fought for Jewish rights worldwide and led the successful fight to
secure more than a billion dollars in restitution from Swiss banks for
Holocaust victims and their heirs. As a philanthropist, Bronfman took
the lead in creating and funding many efforts to strengthen Jewish
identity among young people.Jewish advocate Edgar Bronfman dies | Ynetnews

Billionaire
businessman and longtime president of World Jewish Congress, which
lobbied Soviets to allow Jews to emigrate and helped spearhead search
for Nazi loot, passes away in New York at 84

Associated Press 12.22.13

Edgar M. Bronfman Sr., the billionaire businessman and longtime president of the World Jewish
Congress, which lobbied the Soviets to allow Jews to emigrate and
helped spearhead the search for hidden Nazi loot, died Saturday. He was
84.
The Canadian-born Bronfman died at his New York home surrounded by
family, according to the family charity he led, The Samuel Bronfman
Foundation.Bronfman made his
fortune with his family's Seagram's liquor empire, taking over as
chairman and CEO in 1971 and continuing the work of his father, Samuel.
Under Bronfman's leadership, Seagram expanded its offerings and was
eventually acquired by French media and telecom group Vivendi Universal
in 2000.
But Bronfman's wealth, combined with his role in the World Jewish
Congress, an umbrella group of Jewish organizations in some 80 countries
that he led for more than a quarter century, allowed him to be a
tireless advocate for his fellow Jews."He was the first of his kind, a titan of industry that dedicated
himself fully to advocating, advancing and encouraging the Jewish
people," said Dana Raucher, executive director of The Samuel Bronfman
Foundation.
"Bronfman laid an example for all of us involved in Jewish communal
affairs and his legacy framed much of the agenda for the challenges
facing world Jewry even today," the European Jewish Congress (EJC) said
in a statement.

(...)In a 1986 Associated Press profile, he said his position and money helped him have access to world leaders.
"It's a combination of the two," Bronfman said. "In the end, it
doesn't really matter why that access is available, as long as it is
there."The year before, he had become the first congress president to meet
with Soviet officials in Moscow, bringing his case for human rights and
taking a little time to promote Seagram's interests. He visited again in
1988, by which time Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union, a key goal
of the congress, had begun to rise under the reforming leadership of
Mikhail Gorbachev.
During the 1980s and 1990s, the congress also helped lead the effort
to gain $11 billion in restitution for heirs of Holocaust victims.(...)

As president of the World Jewish Congress, from 1981 until 2007, Mr.
Bronfman turned a loose, cautious federation of Jewish groups in 66
countries into a more focused, confrontational organization.(...)

Mr. Bronfman said he had grown up with a confused understanding of his
Jewish identity. The Bronfmans kept a kosher home, and the children
received religious schooling on weekends. But during the week Edgar and
his younger brother, Charles, were among a handful of Jews sent to
private Anglophile schools, where they attended chapel and ate pork. “No
one said anything to my face,” Mr. Bronfman remembered, “but I
constantly heard comments denigrating Jews.”(...)

At the same time, Mr. Bronfman was becoming increasingly involved in
Jewish causes. He was elected president of the World Jewish Congress in
1981. “Making money is marvelous, and I love doing it, and I do it
reasonably well,” he told The New York Times
in 1986, “but it doesn’t have the gripping vitality that you have when
you deal with the happiness of human life and with human deprivation.”(...)

Edgar Sr., for his part, became a major philanthropist through the
family foundation, with a focus on Jewish educational and social
programs in the United States and Israel. At New York University, he
helped establish the Edgar M. Bronfman Center for Jewish Student Life.(...)

His work with the World Jewish Congress also accelerated. In the 1990s
the Congress, spurred by Mr. Bronfman, negotiated with Eastern European
countries to recover — or at least receive compensation for — the
property of Jews that had been seized first by the Nazis and then by the
Communists.

In the late ’90s, the Congress became one of the foremost critics of
Switzerland’s role during World War II, accusing Swiss banks of having
stolen the deposits of European Jews who died during the war. After
several years of bitter negotiations, Swiss banks agreed in 1999 to
distribute at least $1.25 billion in compensation to relatives of
European Jews who had secretly deposited their money in Switzerland
before perishing at the Nazis’ hands.

Mr. Bronfman acknowledged that he could be abrasive in pursuing Jewish
causes, but he defended his approach, telling The Times in 1986, “I
would like every Jew to be as comfortable in his skin as I am in mine.”

LOL--Saving tax shouldn’t be reason to donate: Bronfman — Philanthropy
shouldn’t only be about making donations, Charles Bronfman says. If you
want to give to charities in a significant way, do so with conviction
and manage your giving like a business, he advised.
Bronfman, chair of...

improvement of the quality of life in Montreal, New York and Israel, the three communities in which we have offices.

(...) Perhaps we are best known for, in Canada, the Heritage Project,
which began by showing one minute made-for-TV, movie quality, shorts of
Canadian successes about which most citizens were unaware.(...)

This sentiment, once expressed by Marshall McLuhan, helps explain
the on-going crisis of Canadian identity. Television strips away much
of a viewer's identity leaving him disoriented and not knowing who he
is. American television strips away whatever is left of our Canadian
identity.

Canada is a "border-line" case as McLuhan was fond of
reminding us, with 90% of its population living within 100 miles of the
American border. The American networks, therefore, easily target
Canadian heritage for takeover. American TV has sucked out our brains,
stripped away our identity and left us with only one truly Canadian
artifact--our never-ending Constitutional debate. The "French problem."

In a brave and bold attempt to fight fire with fire and recover
some small shred of our national identity, the Heritage Project has
produced dozens of one-minute micro-movies depicting our country's
dynamic heritage and heroes. Canada's three television networks, most
independent broadcasters, and specialty cable networks run the Heritage
Minutes between commercials and regular programming. The vignettes can
also be seen in Cineplex-Odeon and Empire chain theatres across Canada.

The idea for the Heritage Project originated with Charles
Bronfman who wondered, "if television can be used to persuade audiences
to do and buy all kinds of things, why can't it be used to show
Canadians what a fascinating past they have?" The sponsors, who include
The CRB Foundation, Power Broadcasting, and Canada Post chose Marshall
McLuhan as one of the first subjects for its crash course in Canadian
history. Therein lies an irony: "Pull the plug!" was McLuhan's simple
solution. The sponsors, wisely, ignored his advice and gave us instead a
magic moment of TV wizardry by scriptwriter Patrick Watson and director
Al Waxman. One Heritage minute electronically documents the tremendous
contribution of this global communication giant.(...)

Québec enjoys a stronger sense of cultural identity than does the
rest of Canada. Being a French island in a sea of North American
anglophones actually acts as a more effective barrier to the invasion of
American culture than our Maple Leaf flag, our national borders and our
Constitution with its Charter of Rights. In fact, English Canada is in
much greater peril of losing its distinctiveness than is Québec. English
Canada, instead of Québec, should be declared a distinct and endangered
society.

Into the breach of threatened Canadian identity steps The
Heritage Minutes. The project cannot undo commercial television's 45
year assault, but it might begin to stem the tide. Marshall, I am
confident, would have approved of fighting fire with fire--trying to win
back a measure of our lost Canadian identity using the medium most
responsible for its loss. He would also have supported the use of the
one minute format--an electronic one-liner--as an effective strategy for
gaining the attention of a generation whose psyche and attention span
has been beaten down and destroyed by television, drug abuse, the fast
life, rock music and videos.(...)

“Stephen Harper has never been to
Israel,” Stephen Bronfman said bluntly. “I took Justin there five years
ago and he was referring at the end of the trip to Israel as we. So I
thought that was pretty good.”

Once strong supporters of the Liberal party, the support of Canada’s Jewish community has shifted in recent years.

When
Harper’s Conservatives came to power in 2006 and moved Canada’s
position on the Middle East closer to Israel, many members of Canada’s
Jewish community began to vote with their wallets, shifting their
political donations to the Conservative party.

The Conservatives
have also actively wooed Jewish Canadians. Some have been surprised to
receive cards at their homes marking Jewish holidays. Last year Harper
hosted a menorah lighting ceremony to celebrate Hannukah at the prime
minister’s residence.

Rick Roth, press secretary to Foreign
Affairs Minister John Baird, says the relationship is deeper than
niceties, reiterating the refrain that under the Harper government,
Israel has had no greater friend than Canada.

“Canada stands for
what is principled and just, regardless of whether it is popular,
convenient, or expedient,” said Roth.

”Under our government, Canada no
longer panders to every dictator with a vote at the UN. At the UN and
elsewhere, we make very clear that Israel’s right to exist is
non-negotiable, and we vote against one-sided and unfair resolutions.”

The result has been a significant shift in support – and donations – to the Conservatives.

Bronfman, whose family is one of the most prominent in Canada’s Jewish community, says reversing that shift won’t be easy.

“It’s
a challenge,” he admitted. “Harper and the Conservatives have been very
pro-Israel and we’ve got to win back the community so we’ll work hard
on that.”

Asked about a comment by Liberal Party President Mike
Crawley that there isn’t that much that separates the Liberals and
Conservatives on Israel as people think, Bronfman was discreet.

“We
all have the same goals. That is just to have a good policy and do the
best we can – raise money from all communities, Jews, Muslims, Indians,
you name it.”

Bronfman has his work cut out for him. In 2012, The
Conservative party fundraising outpaced the Liberal party by nearly two
to one, pocketing $17 million to the Liberals’ $8.9 million. The NDP
raised $7.6 million.

However, Bronfman refused to reveal exactly what target, if any, he has set for fundraising in 2013.

“The goal is to raise a lot of money and help Justin become prime minister.”

“It takes a lot of money. The Conservatives raise a lot of money and we have got to raise an equal amount of money.”

Crawley
said Bronfman did a good job on Trudeau’s leadership campaign and he
believes Bronfman can help the Liberal party tap into a wide range of
supporters, including people who haven’t necessarily donated to a
political party in the past.

"The World Jewish Congress has been at war with Germany
for seven years."

- Rabbi M. Perlzweig (head of the British Section of the
World Jewish Congress), Toronto Evening Telegram, February 26, 1940.

"We are not denying and are not afraid to confess that
this war is our war and that it is waged for the liberation of Jewry...
Stronger than all fronts together is our front, that of Jewry. We are not only
giving this war our financial support on which the entire war production is
based, we are not only providing our full propaganda power which is the moral
energy that keeps this war going. The guarantee of victory is predominantly
based on weakening the enemy forces, on destroying them in their own country,
within the resistance. And we are the Trojan horses in the enemy's fortress.
Thousands of Jews living in Europe constitute the principal factor in the
destruction of our enemy. There, our front is a fact and the most valuable aid
for victory."

- Chaim Weizmann, President of the World Jewish Congress,
Head of the Jewish Agency and later President of Israel, in a Speech on
December 3, 1942, in New York.

Along with the minimizing of particular Jewish victimhood was the development of formulas stressing Nazi "godlessness," which exaggerated Nazi animus toward Christian denominations. Wartime discourse was filled with references to the "Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish" victims of Nazism. (It was during the Hitler years that American philo-Semites invented the "Judeo-Christian tradition" to combat innocent, or not so innocent, language that spoke of a totalitarian assault on "Christian civilization.")(26) A variant of this theme acknowledged the present Jewish priority in victimhood but held that, once finished with Jews, Hitler would turn on others. (27)

David
Irving comments: Billionaire Edgar Bronfman (right) is stated in the
Jewish press to have been one of the major financial contributors to Deborah Lipstadt, paying the millions of dollars that were used to finance her neutral expert witnesses to testify as they did in Mr Irving's libel action against her.

Murder Discussed at High-Level Bronfman Meeting

In
2005 New York magazine noted Edgar Bronfman “belongs to one of the
world’s most exclusive clubs, an impossibly elite gathering known as the
‘Mega Group.’ It consists of about a dozen inconceivably rich Jews who
get together several times a year, often in either Bronfman’s or [CBS
owner] Larry Tisch’s apartment. . . .”

In 1990, an unexpected source advised Andrew St. George—chief
correspondent for The Spotlight (forerunner of AFP)—there had been a
high-level meeting at Bronfman’s New York apartment attended by top
financial patrons and leaders of the Zionist movement. (This was the
“Mega Group” although its name was not then known.) Devoted to combating
the purported “rise of anti-Semitism,” the meeting’s participants
included financier Felix G. Rohatyn and Jacques Torczyner, president of the Zionist Organization of America.

Andrew’s source told him
Torczyner said, in words to these effect: “It’s time that we put a stop
to Willis Carto and his newspaper, The Spotlight.” Torczyner said
specifically that Carto and his associates should be “hunted and shot
like quail.”

Torczyner’s candor disturbed at least some of his fellow power brokers who responded, “We can’t use the tactics of our enemies.”

In
fact, it was the aforementioned Rohatyn who told St. George about the
meeting. A longtime newsman, St. George knew many people, Rohatyn among
them.

St. George took the story to Carto and Mark Lane, The Spotlight’s anti-Zionist Jewish attorney, who wrote a letter
to Torczyner warning him against making further threats. Still, a
continuing campaign to destroy The Spotlight culminated with the
populist weekly driven out of business in 2001. Thank goodness, AFP
picked up The Spotlight’s fallen torch.

Carto
had reason to be concerned: Bronfman fingerprints were all over the JFK
assassination conspiracy. For the tip of that iceberg, read “Rothschild-Israeli Ties to JFK” in the December 9 & 16, 2013 issue of AFP.

It
was inevitable Bronfman’s Seagram Co. would purchase a controlling
interest in Time-Warner in 1993. Mob-connected Bronfman associates had
already moved on this media empire, going back to a 1967 merger between
Warner Brothers Studios and Seven Arts Productions, run by a frontman
for Bronfman partner Meyer Lansky. The new operation—soon merged with
Time publishing—became Time-Warner.A sampling of holdings in the
Time Warner octopus over the years:

Edgar Bronfman Jr. operated Seagram as his
personal plaything after Seagram bought Hollywood giant, MCA, bringing
MCA subsidiaries—Universal Studios and Universal Music—and TV channels
in Europe and Latin America into Bronfman hands.Last but far from
least: With the Rothschilds, the Oppenheimers of South Africa and the
late Armand Hammer, Bronfman money bankrolled the move into the United
States by Australian media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, now a major influence
over the American “conservative” movement.

The
Bronfmans were the “godfathers” behind the career of Arizona Sen. John
McCain (R), Israel’s most outspoken advocate in Congress. McCain’s $150
million fortune comes from his marriage to Cindy Hensley who inherited
one of the nation’s largest beer distribution companies fromher father,
Jim Hensley.

Hensley made his money as a henchman of Kemper Marley
who, for 40 years, was political boss of Arizona and the Lansky
syndicate’s front man in the Gem State. The Bronfmans set Marley up in
business and after Hensley took the rap for Marley in a criminal case,
Hensley’s reward was the beer business now in McCain family hands. (Michael Collins Piper, American Free Press, Jan 6 and ;13, 2014)

Huge Hole Exposed in McCain's Finance Reform, Michael Colllins Piper, 2008"In
fact, as AFP pointed out in an in-depth article on Feb. 4, 2008, McCain
owes his entire career to the indirect sponsorship of the powerful
organized-crime-enriched family of liquor billionaire Edgar Bronfman,
head of the World Jewish Congress. McCain’s chief backer in Arizona
politics, Kemper Marley, was a front man for the Bronfman family and
McCain’s own family beer distribution fortune came through this
connection. In
addition, much of McCain’s own campaign money has come from a clique of
groups and individuals all of whom have close ties to the Israeli
lobby, including: organized crime-linked gambling interests in Las
Vegas, international bankers such as Goldman Sachs, and Hollywood
figures such as the late mob-linked LewWasserman. McCain’s
father, the late Adm. John McCain, was a key player in the official
U.S. government cover-up of Israel’s murder of 34 American sailors
aboard the USS Liberty on June 8, 1967."

As
AFP pointed out, McCain’s late father-in-law, Jim Hensley, was a top
figure in the organized crime power network surrounding one Kemper
Marley, who acted as the front man in Arizona for the Bronfman
family—key players in the Lansky crime syndicate, popularly though
inaccurately referred to as “the Mafia”—who used Marley to control both
major political parties in that state.

The
Bronfman family has long been allied with the Rothschilds as among the
leading billionaire patrons of Israel and the global Zionist movement,
so much so that Edgar Bronfman, head of the dynasty, was, for many years
head of the World Jewish Congress (WJC), which is now lorded over by
his son Matthew, who is chairman of the WJC’s governing board.

Eight
years ago, when McCain first ran for president, Edgar Bronfman was a
contributor to his campaign. And at the time McCain included among his
closest advisors the ubiquitous William Kristol of the stridently
pro-Israel neo-conservative journal, The Weekly Standard, whose
owner, media baron Rupert Murdoch, rose to wealth and power through the
sponsorship of the Rothschild and Bronfman families.

Kristol
has attended the secretive Bilderberg meetings that are sponsored
jointly on an annual basis by the Rothschild family in partnership with
their American confreres in the Rockefeller family.

So
the McCain-Bronfman-Rothschild connection is intimate on multiple
levels and explains much about McCain’s long-standing tendency to be an
almost feverish advocate for Israel’s interests."

CHAPTER TENThe Bronfman Gang:The Royal Family of American Jewry—“Godfathers” to Al Capone and John McCain

Once described as “the Rothschilds of the New World,” the family
Bronfman—although officially based in Canada—certainly constitutes the
proverbial “royal family” of the American Jewish establishment, inasmuch
as the family’s influence is solidly entrenched in the United States,
reaching from NewYork to Hollywood and everything in between.
Proteges—directly and indirectly—of the Bronfman syndicate have included
multiple powerful and well-known personages ranging from Al Capone to
U.S. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).

Although best known for their control of the Seagram liquor empire,
this legendary—and quite sinister—family controls much,much more.

In some respects they personify “the ultimate Jewish success story.”
They represent virtually everything that is truly bad—in the classic
sense—about Jewish power and influence in America. And while they may
not technically be the wealthiest Jewish family in America, per se—there
are others that are much,much richer—the Bronfmans have a certain
level of clout and prominence that few other families can claim. After
all, of course, Edgar Bronfman—reigning patriarch of the family—was the
longtime head of the World Jewish Congress.And that’s a title with
clout.

As far back as 1978, Bronfman family biographer Peter Newman, writing
in The Bronfman Dynasty, estimated that the aggregate assets held by
the various branches of the family totaled some $7 billion. He cited
Fortune magazine which declared—at the time—“The Bronfman fortune
rivals that of all but a small number of North American families,
including some that gathered their strength in the 19th century when
taxes had no more impact on wealth than poor boxes.”

Since then, of course, the Bronfmans have increasingly compounded their wealth and their influence has grown proportionally.

Originally,we have been told, the Bronfman clan came as immigrants to
Canada under the sponsorship—like many others—of the various Jewish
charities under the thumb of Europe’s Rothschild family, the great
financial house that has ruled from behind the scenes for generations.

However, the Bronfman empire as we know it today was founded by
buccaneering, sharp-nosed businessman Sam Bronfman who—with his
brothers—made millions in the liquor business—and many millions more by
shipping their liquor into the United States where it was illegally
consumed during Prohibition. Thus, the family forged early links with
the U.S. crime syndicate headed jointly by Russian-born, New York-based
Jew, Meyer Lansky, and his Italian partners, Charles “Lucky” Luciano
and Frank Costello.

In fact—and this is probably a dirty little secret better left
unmentioned—there is hardly a border town in the northern regions of the
United States—from Maine to Washington state—where one could not find
tidy family fortunes accumulated by locals (not always Jewish, but many
who are) who were part of the Bronfman-Lansky liquor smuggling
network.

And in the big cities, a “connection” with the Lansky-Bronfman network
was a “must” for anyone who wanted to succeed. The truth is that even
Chicago’s Italian-American crime prince, Al Capone, owed his rise to
power to his Bronfman connection—another little-known fact that has
been largely suppressed by the media in the United States.

Despite all the hoopla over Capone’s purported “rule” over Chicago, at
no time ever did Capone control more than one-fourth of the rackets in
the Windy City. And what’s more, as famed independent crime writer Hank
Messick has pointed out in his classic study, Secret File (G. P.
Putnam’s Sons, 1969), Capone—powerful though he was—never held a title
higher than “capo” (or “captain”)—head of a crew of ten men—in the ranks
of the formally organized Italian-American “Mafia” crime network in
Chicago.

Another point often forgotten in the legend of “the Mafia” is that
Capone,in fact,was only permitted to become a formal member of the Mafia
after Italian-American crime bosses in Chicago relaxed Mafia
membership rules to permit certain selected non-Sicilians such as
Capone (who was born in Naples on mainland Italy) to join

If fact, the truth is that Capone was ultimately answering to much
bigger, more secretive bosses behind the scenes,who were based“back
east”—part of the “elite” group surrounding the aforementioned infamous
New York-based Jewish crime chief Meyer Lansky (who ultimately switched
his operations to Miami and, for a brief period—many years later—to
Israel).

It was the Lansky group—including Lansky’s Jewish partner Benjamin
“Bugsy” Siegel and his Italian-born partners, Costello and Luciano—that
sent Capone (a distant Luciano cousin) to Chicago in the first place.

In their notable Lansky biography, Meyer Lansky: Mogul of the Mob
(Paddington Press, 1979), written in cooperation with Lansky, Israeli
writers Dennis Eisenberg, Uri Dan and Eli Landau fill in some of the
missing elements left out by Capone’s biographers.

Lansky himself told his Israeli biographers that “It was Bugsy Siegel
who knew him well when Capone lived and worked on the Lower East side .
. . [He was a] close enough friend of Capone’s to hide him out with
one of his aunts”when Capone got in trouble on a murder charge.”

To get him out of the line of law enforcement fire, Lansky sent Capone
to Chicago to act as a tough in the gang of JohnnyTorrio, a NewYorker
who had“gone west”and was moving to unseat his own uncle, old-time
gangster “Big Jim” Colosimo, as boss of the Italian-American Mafia in
Chicago.

Essentially, Torrio had been Lansky’s Chicago pointman and Capone quickly moved up the ranks and became Torrio’s right-hand man.

Organized crime writer Messick noted that Capone’s positioning
“delighted” the Lansky crowd “because Capone was very much their man.
Although Capone eventually became his own master in Chicago, running
scores of rackets . . . his loyalty to his New York friends was so firm
that Lansky and [Luciano] knew they could always count on him.”

And it is worth pointing out that Capone’s immediate“boss” in Chicago,
Torrio,was also the Chicago contact for the liquor interests of the
Canadianbased Bronfman liquor empire which was shipping its legally
produced products over the border for illegal consumption by
Prohibition-era American drinkers. Sam Bronfman and his family worked
closely with the Lansky syndicate from the beginning. Therefore, the
Torrio-Capone link brought the connection full circle.

Meanwhile, Chicago’s ruling boss, Colosimo, was doing nothing to endear
himself to either Bronfman or Lansky and Siegel whom he was known to
refer to as “dirty Jews.”

Colosimo proclaimed that he couldn’t understand why Luciano dealt so
closely with Lansky and Siegel, saying “I sometimes have a suspicion
that he must have some Jewish blood in his veins,” a suspicion that—in
light of Luciano’s subsequent fate, as we shall see—is highly unlikely.

In addition, Colosimo asserted there was “no future in bootlegging” and
showed little interest in patronizing the Bronfman liquor supply.
Colosimo wanted to focus on drugs, prostitution and loan-sharking. His
boycott of Bronfman was cutting into the Lansky syndicate’s profits.

Needless to say,when the time was ripe, Lansky (viaTorrio and Capone)
moved against Colosimo who was gunned down by a NewYork Jewish gangster
sent in to do the job. The biggest wreath at Colosimo’s lavish funeral
featured a card that read: “From the sorrowing Jew boys of New York.”
Soon enough, the Bronfman liquor came flowing into Chicago, courtesy of
Lansky’s henchman Torrio and his right-hand man, Capone, soon to
emerge as the media’s favorite “Mafia” figure.

So when we look at the forces behind even the most notorious
Italian-American gangster of the 20th century,we find his roots buried
deep within the Bronfman (and Zionist) camp.And that is news in itself.

As noted, the current head of the Bronfman family is Edgar Bronfman
who—aside from his extensive international business dealings—also served
as the longtime president of the World Jewish Congress, from which
position he exerted considerable political clout.

Bronfman, of course, was the key player in the recent (and ongoing)
effort to extort billions of dollars from Swiss banks for their alleged
involvement in laundering of “Jewish gold” said to be stolen by the
Nazis, and for having confiscated the wealth of certain Jewish persons
from Europe who hid their vast wealth in Swiss banks prior to World War
II.

The question as to how this vast wealth was actually accumulated has
never been explained by the media, although the involvement of the
Bronfman family in the controversy may provide a key to it in part.

It is known that the Bronfmans achieved much of their own initial
wealth prior to World War II in the illegal liquor trade, in concert
with American crime syndicate figure Meyer Lansky whose operations
ranged far and wide,well beyond American shores.

It is also known that Lansky was one of the prime movers, for the crime
syndicate, behind the use of Swiss bank accounts for the laundering of
criminal proceeds.Thus, it is certain that some of those who were
taken into custody by the Third Reich and whose bank accounts were
confiscated were actually agents of the Lansky-Bronfman syndicate and
thus engaged in illegal activity. The “persecuted” Jews—in these
cases—were common criminals.

Bronfman’s son, Edgar Jr., is perhaps as equally powerful as his
father, although from another venue. The younger Bronfman assumed
control of Universal Studios and all of the related entertainment
subsidiaries now under the control of the Bronfman empire. A major player
in Hollywood and in the music and film production area, Edgar Jr.
reportedly bungled a major family investment when he entered the family
into partnership with the French-based Vivendi corporation, but no
members of the Bronfman family have been seen panhandling on the streets
of New York, Beverly Hills or Montreal as of this writing.

Edgar’s lesser-known son, Matthew, is highly active in Jewish affairs
and serves as chairman of the program committee and chairman of the
Bronfman Center for Jewish Life Committee.In 2007 he was elected as
chairman of the governing board of theWorld Jewish Congress, long headed
by his father and he is also chairman of the World Jewish Congress
Budget and Finance Commission and is also a member of its steering
committee.

He is the head of a NewYork-based investment company, BHB Holdings, and
likewise is a controlling shareholder of one of Israel’s largest banks,
Israel Discount Bank and a controlling shareholder in SuperSal, the
largest supermarket chain in Israel.Another of his enterprises is
control of the IKEA franchise in Israel, where he also has substantial
real estate holdings, aside from those he maintains in the United
States.

Among other things, Mathew Bronfman was chairman and CEO of Candle
Acquisitions Company, a specialty candle manufacturer, and chairman of
Sterling Cellular Holdings, a cellular telephone firm.In his early years
he was involved in other Bronfman holdings. He was also employed at
the Goldman Sachs international banking firm, demonstrating, again, the
interlock among the global Jewish forces in the Rothschild Empire.

The Seagrams company is regularly among the largest political
contributors to both of the major American political parties. This is
interesting in itself for when, during the 1996 presidential campaign,
Bill Clinton was attacking his GOP opponent Bob Dole for accepting
contributions from the tobacco industry, the fact that both major
parties were taking sizable contributions from the alcohol industry—in
particular the Bronfman empire—seems to have gone largely unmentioned.

As distinguished an “American” institution as Du Pont, for example,
fell under Bronfman control. In 1981, Du Pont, then the seventh largest
corporation in the United States,was targeted for takeover by the
Bronfman family.

Actually, at that point, the Bronfmans already owned 20 percent of Du
Pont—a substantial holding in itself, for in the corporate world, even
as little as 3 percent ownership of a corporation’s stock gives the
owner effective control of a corporation.

Although the traditional American name of “Du Pont” continued to appear
on the corporate papers and on Du Pont products sold to American
consumers, the real power behind the scenes was the Bronfman empire.

In truth, the Du Pont family—although still quite wealthy, having
accumulated their financial resources over several generations—had
little influence within the corporation that bore the family name.
Ultimately, the Bronfmans officially divested their holdings in Du Pont,
but used their resources to expand their wealth and tentacles
elsewhere.

Today the Bronfmans are very much a recognized part of not only the
plutocratic establishment in the United States, but throughout the
world.

In addition, the Bronfmans also had an interest in the Ernest W. Hahn
Company (which then operated 27 regional shopping centers in California
and had plans for another 29); and theTrizec Corp., one of the biggest
property development companies in North America.

The Bronfmans also hold considerable assets in some “unexpected” and
“out of the way” places. For example, the Bronfman controlled Cadillac
Fairview corporation—which develops commercial rental
properties—developed a shopping center in Hickory, North Carolina and
(in 1978) was in the process of setting up two others.Another Bronfman
enterprise is the Shannon Mall in Atlanta and the Galleria in
Westchester, New York.

In addition, a Bronfman subsidiary held options on a shopping center
development in Mississippi and for yet another in Connecticut. Bronfman
companies also controlled industrial parks in and near Los Angeles,
office towers in Denver and in San Francisco, and housing developments
in Nevada, California and Florida. The Bronfmans also bought control of
the share capital of Houston-based General Homes Consolidated Cos.
Inc., building houses and developing land with operations reaching as
far as Mississippi and Alabama.

For many years the family—although this was not well known—controlled
vast tracts of land in the outer reaches of the Virginia suburbs
surrounding Washington, D.C., lucrative land that the family, in recent
years, has been relinquishing at great profit.

And as a reminder: the various United States holdings of the Bronfman
family listed here do not constitute anything resembling a complete
overview of their portfolio.And none of this covers the Bronfman
holdings in Canada alone, for example, and elsewhere.

All of this financial clout, taken together, also constitutes
significant political power in the various states and locales where the
Bronfman influence has taken root.

Of particular interest in that regard is the hidden influence of the
Bronfman family in the state of Arizona—an outpost viewed in the minds
of most Americans as somehow a paradise of cowboys, cactus and wide-open
spaces, a conservative stronghold seemingly independent of the
corruption and intrigue found in the big cities like New York, Miami,
Chicago and Los Angeles. In fact, Arizona ranks alongside the great crime
capitals.This dubious distinction can be traced directly to the
influence in Arizona of the Bronfman family.

Bronfman family influence in Arizona is so strong that it can be
rightly said that the Bronfmans are no less than the “godfathers” behind
the political career of America’s best known “reformer”—Arizona
Senator John McCain. Here’s the story:

In 1976 a crusading Phoenix reporter, Don Bolles, was murdered by a
car-bomb after writing a series of stories exposing the organized crime
connections of a wide-ranging number of well-known figures in Arizona
who were closely associated with a character named Jim Hensley.

Five years later“Honest John”McCain arrived in Arizona as the new
husband of Hensley’s daughter, Cindy. “From the moment McCain landed in
Phoenix,” according to Charles Lewis of the Center for Public
Integrity,“ the Hensleys were key sponsors of his political career.” But
the fact is, the people behind the Hensley fortune are even more
interesting and controversial.

While it is well-known McCain’s father-in-law was the owner of the
biggest Anheuser-Busch beer distributorships in Arizona—one of the
largest beer distributors in the nation—the mainstream media has had
nothing to say about the origins of the Hensley fortune that financed
McCain’s rise to power.The Hensley fortune is no more than a regional
offshoot of the vast bootlegging and rackets empire of the Bronfman
dynasty who, in turn, were major players—as noted before—in the crime
syndicate ruled by Meyer Lansky and his partners, both in the United
States and abroad.

McCain’s father-in-law got his start as a top henchman of one Kemper
Marley who, for some forty years until his death in 1990 at age 84,was
the undisputed behind-the-scenes political boss of Arizona. But Marley
was much more than a machine politician. In fact, he was also the Lansky
crime syndicate’s top man in Arizona, the protege of Lansky
lieutenant, Phoenix gambler Gus Greenbaum, who, in 1941, set up a
national wire for bookmakers. After Lansky ordered a hit on his own
longtime partner,“Bugsy” Siegel, who was stealing money from the
Flamingo Casino in Las Vegas — which was financed in part by loans from
an Arizona bank chaired by Marley — Greenbaum turned operations of the
wire over to Marley while Greenbaum took Siegel’s place in tending to
Lansky’s interests in Las Vegas.

In 1948 Greenbaum was murdered in a mob“hit” that set off a series of
gang wars in Phoenix,but Marley survived and prospered as did Jim
Hensley, who sponsored McCain’s rise to power.

During this time Marley was building up a liquor distribution monopoly
in Arizona.According to Marley’s longtime public relations man, Al
Lizanitz, it was the Bronfman family that set Marley up in the liquor
business. McCain’s father-in-law was the top lieutenant for Kemper
Marley, the Lansky syndicate’s chief Arizona operative who acted, in
turn, as the front man for the Bronfman family—key players in the
Lansky syndicate.

During Prohibition, the Canadian-based Bronfmans supplied—and thus
controlled—the “spigot” of liquor funneled to Lansky syndicate
functionaries in the United States, including Al Capone in Chicago.
After Prohibition, Lansky-Bronfman associates such as Marley got control
of a substantial portion of liquor (and beer) distribution across the
country. Marley’s longtime public relations man, Al Lizanitz, revealed
that it was, in fact, the Bronfmans who set Marley up in the alcohol
business in the first place.

In 1948, 52 of Marley’s employees (including Jim Hensley, the manager
of Marley’s company) were prosecuted for federal liquor violations.
Hensley got a six-month suspended sentence and his brother Eugene went
to prison for a year.

In 1953 Hensley and (this time) Marley were prosecuted by federal
prosecutors for falsifying liquor records, but young attorney William
Rehnquist acted as their “mouthpiece” (as mob attorneys are known) and
the two got off scot-free. Rehnquist later became chief justice of the
Supreme Court and presided over the “fix” that made GeorgeW. Bush
president in a rightly disputed election.

Arizona insiders say Hensley “took the fall” for Marley in 1948 and
Marley paid back Hensley by setting him up in his own beer distribution
business. Although, during the 2008 presidential campaign, Newsweek
implied Hensley’s company was a “mom and pop” operation that became a
big success, the real story goes to the heart of the history of
organized crime at the highest levels.

McCain’s father-in-law also dabbled in dog racing and expanded his
fortune by selling his track to an individual connected to the
Buffalo-based Jacobs family, key Prohibition-era cogs in the Lansky
network as distributors of Bronfman liquor.

Expanding over the years, buying up race tracks and developing food and
drink concessions at sports stadiums, Jacobs enterprises were
described as being probably the biggest quasi-legitimate cover for
organized crime’s money-laundering in the United States.

In 1976, Hensley’s mentor—Marley (at the height of his power)—was the
key suspect behind the aforementioned contract murder of journalist Don
Bolles who was investigating the mob in Arizona, but Marley was never
prosecuted.

While John McCain himself cannot be held personally responsible for the
sins of his late father-in-law—whose fortune was passed on to his
daughter, Cindy McCain, John’s wife—the fact is that “reformer” McCain
owes his political and financial fortunes to the good graces of the
biggest names in organized crime. Perhaps it is no wonder that, today,
the Las Vegas gambling industry is among McCain’s primary financial
benefactors.

This overview is really just the tip of the iceberg but it does say
much about McCain and the political milieu that spawned him,
particularly in light of McCain’s front-line position as one of Israel’s
leading U.S. supporters.

Ironically, though, as noted earlier, in the 2008 presidential
campaign, McCain was endorsed by an American member of the Rothschild
family and had a fundraiser held on his behalf by the Rothschilds in
London, Edgar Bronfman chose to publicly endorse Barack Obama over
McCain, evidently “turned off” by McCain’s Christian fanatic running
mate, Sarah Palin.

And this, too, should be noted for the historical record regarding the
Bronfman family: In light of this author’s own rather
widely-distributed work on the assassination of President John F.
Kennedy, the book, Final Judgment—which contends that Israel’s
intelligence service, the Mossad, played a major role alongside the CIA
in the assassination of President Kennedy, precisely because of JFK’s
obstinate opposition to Israel’s drive to build nuclear weapons of mass
destruction—that the fingerprints of Sam Bronfman are found all over
the JFK assassination conspiracy. Not only was Bronfman’s longtime
henchman, Louis Bloomfield, chairman of the Mossad-sponsored Permindex
corporation (which included among its directors no less than New Orleans
businessman Clay Shaw, who was indicted by former New Orleans District
Attorney Jim Garrison for involvement in the JFK assassination), but
new evidence indicates that Dallas mob figure Jack Ruby was actually on
the Bronfman payroll.

In addition, while another Bronfman associate in Dallas, oilman Jack
Crichton, hovered around Lee Harvey Oswald’s widow after the JFK
assassination, another Bronfman functionary—“super lawyer” John
McCloy—served on the Warren Commission. McCloy was a director—and
Crichton served as vice president—of the Empire Trust, a financial
combine controlled in part by the Bronfman family.

And although Sam Bronfman is best known for his Seagrams liquor empire,
what many JFK researchers who point their fingers at the “Texas oil
barons” have failed to note is that Sam Bronfman was a Texas oil baron
himself, having purchased Texas Pacific Oil in 1963. As far back as
1949, Allen Dulles, later the CIA director fired by JFK and also a
Warren Commission member, served as an attorney involved in the private
ventures of Bronfman’s daughter Phyllis.

For those interested in the entire story, they should refer to Final
Judgment, which is now in its 768-page sixth edition, thoroughly
documented. The bottom line is that the JFK assassination is
unquestionably, beyond any doubt, the one pivotal event that helped
bring covert Jewish influence to all-new heights in the American power
structure.

The Bronfmans,by any measure,do constitute the“first family”—indeed we
say “the royal family”—of the American Jewish and Zionist
establishments, but certainly secondary to the “Kings of Kings”: The
Rothschilds.

In many respects, though, it might be said that, in terms of
old-fashioned gutter-level organized crime—as opposed to the “high
level” operations of the Rothschild Empire—the Bronfmans are certainly
the Royal Family of the Jewish Crime Syndicate, by virtue of their
newfound respectability, having risen to wealth and glamour from their
early years as partners of the “nonrespectable" Meyer Lansky.

And revolving, as satellites, around the Bronfman dynasty are a
wideranging array of other powerful families which—in turn—have their
own satellite families and financial interests. They constitute the New
Pharisees working to bring the Talmudic dream of the New World Order
into being.

http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/politics/international/features/11158/index5.html
Even some Swiss Jews weren’t happy when the restitution negotiations
began. They viewed Bronfman and Singer as American cowboys, Goldberg
says, coming over to stomp on their rights. Herbits, who was involved in the negotiations, agrees. “They said, ‘You’re
humiliating us and creating anti-Semitism.’”Herbits was on the first trip with Bronfman when he met the Swiss
bankers in 1998. “The bankers there have a club which is in a great,
grand old building,” he says. “We were shown to a waiting room, which
was very ornate and very beautiful, as you can
imagine. Singer, Edgar, and I stood there waiting for 30 minutes.”
The reason they stood, he says, is there were no chairs in the room.
“Then the bankers walked in, six or eight of them in a perfectly
straight line, just like in a movie,” Herbits continues. “And the
first one pulls a statement out of his jacket pocket
and reads it to Edgar. No introductions, no handshakes, nothing. We’re
about to have lunch with these people, and this is what they do.”
In the statement, they offered Bronfman $37 million if he would simply
go away. “The entire world of Swiss restitution would be different if
they hadn’t insulted him that way,” Herbits says.
In fact, it didn’t improve much as negotiations moved forward. A little
later on, Bronfman, Singer, and Avraham Burg, the former head of
Israel’s Labor Party who was then running the Jewish Agency, were seated
across the table from the chairman of the Swiss
bankers’ association and the chairman of Credit Suisse.
“One of the bankers leaned across the table,” Singer remembers, “and
said, ‘You must be mad if you claim that you had hundreds of millions of
dollars in our banks. You know, as I do from having seen all the
pictures of the Jews of Europe during World War II,
that they were all clothed in rags. They were impoverished.’”
Singer, an accomplished, engaging raconteur, believes it was one of the
most critical moments in the negotiations. “Edgar looked at them and
very quietly but very firmly said, ‘That’s a disgusting thing to say
about an entire people. It’s an insulting remark,
and I’m very sorry you made it because it will color the nature of our
negotiations.’”
“Edgar wasn’t there to negotiate money,” Herbits says. “It was
all about the principle, about moral restitution. He wanted an admission
that the Swiss had a role in the problem. Their behavior was
abominable.” Herbits has no doubt that a big part of the reason this
controversy involving the WJC and Leibler has received so much attention
and lasted this long is due to the Swiss component. “There’s just too
much glee among some Jews about this. Isn’t it funny,
they say, that Singer gets caught up in a secret Swiss bank account.
Ultimately, does it hurt the Jews? Of course it does.” (...)

New York Times | Edgar M. Bronfman, Who Brought Elegance and Expansion to Seagram, Dies at 84
Under his leadership, the Congress pressed the Soviet Union to improve
conditions for Jews living within its borders and to allow freer
emigration. Spurred by Mr. Bronfman, the Congress led efforts to expose the hidden Nazi past
of Kurt Waldheim, the former secretary general of the United Nations
who became president of Austria. And it campaigned successfully to force
Swiss banks to make restitutions of more than a billion dollars to the
relatives of German death camp victims who deposited their savings in
Switzerland before World War II.
Mr. Bronfman shrugged off criticism from those who feared that his
aggressive tactics were risking an anti-Semitic backlash. “The answer
isn’t to say, ‘Don’t make trouble,’ and hide our heads in the sand,” he
wrote in his 1998 memoir, “Good Spirits: The Making of a Businessman.”
“We may not earn the friendship of others, but we will demand their
respect.”
(...)His work with the World Jewish Congress also accelerated. In the 1990s
the Congress, spurred by Mr. Bronfman, negotiated with Eastern European
countries to recover — or at least receive compensation for — the
property of Jews that had been seized first by the Nazis and then by the
Communists.
In the late ’90s, the Congress became one of the foremost critics of
Switzerland’s role during World War II, accusing Swiss banks of having
stolen the deposits of European Jews who died during the war. After
several years of bitter negotiations, Swiss banks agreed in 1999 to
distribute at least $1.25 billion in compensation to relatives of
European Jews who had secretly deposited their money in Switzerland
before perishing at the Nazis’ hands.
Mr. Bronfman acknowledged that he could be abrasive in pursuing Jewish
causes, but he defended his approach, telling The Times in 1986, “I
would like every Jew to be as comfortable in his skin as I am in mine.”

Alongtime
Bronfman henchman at Seagrams, Stephen Herbits, was recruited by
then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to make “heads roll” in the
military, screening Pentagon promotions and appointments, enforcing Zionist control of the U.S. war machine.
This move on the military
came in 2006 when top retired American military leaders publicly slammed
the Bush administration for waging war against Iraq, making it clear
they spoke formany colleagues still in the Pentagon who opposed the war
from the start.
Herbits urged the media to investigate military
leaders who dared to take on the administration. Saying it would be “a
service to this country when the media digs a bit below these attacks to
examine the generals,” Herbits was sending a warning: Military leaders
who stood up against civilian warmongers promoting the interests of
Israel were subject to investigation by spy agencies such as the
Anti-Defamation League which could come up with “data” on the dissidents
to destroy them.
After doing his dirty work, Herbits returned to the
Bronfman fold, serving as secretary-general of the World Jewish
Congress and thus Bronfman’s subservient minion. (Michael Collins Piper, American Free Press, Jan 6 and 13, 2014)

THE GOLEM Chapter Fifteen, "Revolt of the Generals : America's Military Elite Take a Stand Against Israel's American Partisans"by Michael Collins Piper

Perhaps the most telling attack on the generals came fromStephen Herbits, a former top executive of the Seagram liquor empire, the fiefdom of World Jewish Congress chief Edgar Bronfman, a major patron of Israel. This longtime Bronfman henchman was appointed by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to make "heads roll" in the military, screening all Pentagon promotions and appointments, implementing the agenda of enforcing lockstep Zionist control of the American war machine.

Writing in the April 2, 2006 edition of the egregiously pro-Israel Washington Times, Herbits urged the media to start to investigate military leaders who dared to take on the administration. Herbits said it would be "a service to this country when the media digs a bit below these attacks to examine the generals."

Herbits was obviously calling on spy agencies such as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a conduit for Israel's Mossad, to come up with "data" on the military men and provide it to the media to bring the dissidents into line.

Incidentally, because Herbits was openly gay and a long-time public advocate for the cause of homosexual rights, there are those who believe that the very reason Herbits had been drafted by the Bush administration to institute so-called "reform" at the Pentagon was so that military figures who opposed Herbits' intrigues at the Pentagon on behalf of the Zionist apparatus would be less likely to criticize the Bronfman family henchman for fear of being accused of anti-gay bias in the event they did dare to challenge Herbits primary agenda: rooting out perceived enemies of Israel inside the American military elite.

And it is worth noting that after Herbits ultimately left the Bush administration, he returned to the Bronfman fold, taking on the post of secretary-general of the World Jewish Congress, demonstrating where Herhits' primary political sympathies lie.

The most significant move Bronfman made is to appoint Seagram's former
executive vice president for external affairs, Stephen E. Herbits, as transition manager. Herbits will direct the WJC's administrative affairs until the new constitution is
fully implemented.
In the memorandum, Bronfman recounts Herbits' ample experience in
transition management, based on his work as a consultant to the United
States Department of Defense, where he helped manage the transition in
2001 from the Clinton administration to Bush's.
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/edgar-bronfman-outlines-his-plan-to-revolutionize-wjc-1.133601

Stephen Herbits wasn't
surprised to hear his old friend Donald Rumsfeld on the other end of
the phone line. The newly appointed secretary of Defense was calling in
January 2001 to enlist Herbits in a familiar role: overseeing Pentagon hiring in
the Bush administration. It was a task that Herbits, who has known Rumsfeld for more than 30 years, has performed for every Republican president since Richard Nixon.

He noted also that Herbits, described by Bronfman as his “right-hand
man” at Seagrams, the Bronfman family company, is less than objective about the matter. Herbits,
whose professional record includes stints as adviser to three U.S.
Defense Department heads, has insisted that his work will speak for his
integrity.

http://www.thejewishweek.com/news/international/wjc_conflict_seen_intensifying
A former top adviser to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Bronfman's right-hand man at Seagram, Herbits was brought into the WJC three years ago to clean up things amid charges of mismanagement.

Michael Collins Piper writes in The High Priests of War: "Notably, one American Jewish writer summed up the Zionist dreams guiding the Bush policy, particularly vis-à-vis Iraq, for Time magazine, a publication that is controlled by Jewish financial interests revolving around the powerful family of Edgar Bronfman, longtime head of the World Jewish Congress. In an essay entitled “How Israel is Wrapped Up in Iraq,” Time columnist Joe Klein wrote with candor:

A stronger Israel is very much embedded in the rationale for war with Iraq. It is a part of the argument that dare not speak its name, a fantasy quietly cherished by the neo-conservative faction in the Bush Administration and by many leaders of the American Jewish community.The fantasy involves a domino theory. The destruction of Saddam’s Iraq will not only remove an enemy of long-standing but will also change the basic power equation in the region. It will send a message to Syria and Iran about the perils of support for Islamic terrorists. It will send a message to the Palestinians too: Democratize and make peace on Israeli terms, or forget about a state of your own. In the wackiest scenario, it will lead to the collapse of the wobbly Hashemite monarchy in Jordan and the establishment of a Palestinian state on that nation’s East Bank. No one in the government ever actually says these things publicly (although some American Jewish leaders do). Usually, the dream is expressed in the mildest possible terms: “I have high hopes that the removal of Saddam will strengthen our democratic allies in the region,” Senator Joe Lieberman told me last week. (Time.com 5 Feb 2003)

Sara Bronfman, humanitarian and human rights activist (born
1976) is the daughter of the billionaire philanthropist and former
Seagram chairman, Edgar Bronfman Sr.(...)Work in Libya
Sara Bronfman first became involved in aiding Libya after traveling as a
delegate with the The Independent Libya Foundation (ILF) in November
2011, during the Arab Spring and after the death of Muammar Gaddafi. (...)
Sara Bronfman is also involved with the Canada-Libya Chamber of Commerce, which was founded on March 12, 2012. Bronfman and fiance Basit Igtet are the inaugural president and chairman of the board respectively.
Positioned to provide help and advice to the people of Libya, the
Chamber of Commerce discourage continued business with groups such as
SNC-Lavalin, who allegedly did business with the Gadaffi regime.[5] The
group is one of several working to restore the economy in the region.

Abdul Basit Igtet To Stand For The Presidency Of Libya TRIPOLI, Libya, April 9, 2014 /PRnewswire-- Abdul Basit Igtet, the businessman and author of "A Plan for Libya", confirmed today that he will stand for the post of President of Libya.
Mr. Igtet commented: "My main objective is that the Libyan people
should build their future on the firm foundations of a well-functioning
and prosperous country. I have come to the conclusion that the best way
for me to bring that about is to stand as President once the new
constitution is in place - when the Libyan people will have the
opportunity to make a democratic choice. I believe firmly that
the new President should be President of all the country - and not just
Tripoli. I will therefore shortly be opening offices in five key towns
outside the capital, to be able to listen and respond to all our
people. I know already how much Libyans are concerned about security,
and about basic services such as housing and roads and schools and
hospitals. But the problems in one town are different from the problems
in another. So, starting in two weeks time, I intend to travel round
our country and learn about the views of the local people. I will take
my professional team with me. They will listen and adapt our policy
plans to immediate needs. To the people of Libya, I say - our
priorities have to become your priorities, that is real democracy. My Presidency will be your Presidency. Your President for your Libya."

Basit Igtet et le va-t-en guerre sioniste juif Joe LiebermanCan A Business Entrepreneur Save Libya? By Carrie Sheffield for FORBES
A Benghazi native, Igtet fled the country as a political exile, finding
refuge in Switzerland, where he became a successful businessman. He
recently enlisted the law firm of foreign policy heavyweight former Sen.
Joe Lieberman in a deal likely to broker him meetings with Obama
administration officials and members of Congress. Lieberman’s office did
not return requests for comment.Sur ce blog: